This week Cain Mathema in his book Why the West and its MDC stooges want Zimbabwe’s Defence and Security Forces reformed that The Patriot is serialising quotes Engels who says, with slavery, which reached its fullest development in civilisation, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. This cleavage has continued during the whole period of civilisation.

ENGELS goes on to say that “Commercial expansion, money, usury, landed property and mortgage were thus accompanied by the rapid concentration and centralisation of wealth in the hands of a small class, on the one hand, and by the increasing impoverishment of the masses and a growing mass of paupers, on the other.
“The new aristocracy of wealth, in so far as it did not from the outset coincide with the old tribal nobility, forced the latter permanently into the background (in Athens, in Rome, among Germans).
“And this division of freemen into classes according to their wealth was accompanied, especially in Greece, by an enormous increase in the number of slaves, whose forced labour formed the basis on which the superstructure of all society was reared, (in Corinth they were 460 000 at the city’s zenith, and in Aegina they were 470 000 at one time, in both cases the slaves were ten times the number of free burghers).”
Engels also says:-
“With slavery, which reached its fullest development in civilisation, came the first great cleavage of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. This cleavage has continued during the whole period of civilisation.
“Slavery was the first form of exploitation, peculiar to the world of antiquity; it was followed by serfdom in the Middle Ages and by wage labour in modern times. These are the three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great epochs of civilisation; open, and, latterly, disguised slavery, are its steady companions.
“The stage of commodity production, with which civilisation began, is marked economically by the introduction of 1) metal money and, thus, of money capital, interest and usury; 2) the merchants acting as middlemen between producers; 3) private ownership of land and mortgage; 4) slave labour as the prevailing form of production.
“The form of the family corresponding to civilisation and under it becoming the definitely prevailing form is monogamy, the supremacy of the man over woman, and the individual family as the economic unit of society.
“The cohesive force of civilised society is the state, which in all typical periods is exclusively the state of the ruling class, and in all cases remains essentially a machine for keeping down the oppressed, exploited class.
“Other marks of civilisation are: on the one hand, fixation of the contrast between town and country as the basis of the entire division of social labour; on the other hand, the introduction of wills, by which the property holder is able to dispose of his property even after his death.
“This institution, which was a direct blow at the old gentile constitution, was unknown in Athens until the time of Solon (638 B.C. – 559 B.C.); in Rome it was introduced very early, but we do not know when.
“Among the Germans it was introduced by the priests in order that the good honest German might without hindrance bequeath his property to the Church.
“With this constitution as its foundation civilisation has accomplished things with which the old gentile society was totally unable to cope.
“But it accomplished them by playing on the most sordid instincts and passions of man, and by developing them at the expense of all his other faculties.
“Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilisation from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth and wealth again; wealth, not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim.
“If, in the pursuit of this aim, the increasing development of science and repeated periods of the fullest blooming of art fell into its lap, it was only because without them the ample present-day achievements in the accumulation of wealth would have been impossible.
“Since the exploitation of one class by another is the basis of civilisation, its whole development moves in a continuous contradiction.
“Every advance in production is at the same time a retrogression in the condition of the oppressed class, that is, of the great majority.
“What is a boon for the one is necessarily a bane for the other; each new emancipation of one class always means a new oppression of another class.”
This is civilisation for us as defined by Engels, this is the socio-economic formation in the West today, this is the socio-economic formation that colonised Zimbabwe in 1890, and this is the socio-economic formation that created the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe and imposed the illegal murderous sanctions on our beautiful motherland.